


He Knows So Much About These Things

by thought



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Asexual Character, Gen, Gray Asexual Character, SI-5's collective hubris gets its own tag, disrespecting bureaucrats as a competitive sport, everybody's lack of boundaries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-28
Updated: 2017-10-28
Packaged: 2019-01-25 11:27:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12530276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thought/pseuds/thought
Summary: Kepler says, "Would you die for me?" and she thinks:'We're in a fucking Walmart.'





	He Knows So Much About These Things

"I mean, merry fucking Christmas, guys," Jacobi says, folding his arms on the table and then putting his face down on top of them. "I feel mislead, the way you told it there would at least be alcohol to go with the seasonal cheer and vicious demoralizing critique of every aspect of our personality, history, personal choices and sense of self."

"This is incredible," Maxwell snarls. She's been pacing ever since they all piled into Kepler's condo fueled by rage and humiliation, her hands clenched behind her back. "We really respect what you guys do! You're a super valuable team! Also, hey, go fuck yourselves."

"I'm going... to schedule a one-on-one with Mr. Cutter," Kepler says, evenly. He's already poured himself a glass of whisky. It's 10:00 AM. Technically, they should all be at work. Technically, they'd all probably wind up killing someone by the end of the day if they had stayed.

"Oh good," Maxwell snipes. "He can threaten you more explicitly without witnesses, I'm sure that'll be super productive."

"Come on, you heard the nice lady, we're diversifying our skills," Jacobi says to the table.

"Which is another thing," Maxwell continues. "Who the hell was she? What even is a "change manager"?"

"I sincerely wish I didn't know the answer to that question," Kepler says, darkly.

"You'd better brush up on your bureaucracy, Sir," Jacobi says. "You're going to need it now that you're not allowed on field missions anymore."

"It just isn't proper, the head of the Intelligence department risking himself out there," Maxwell parrots the Change Manager's gentle, serious tone. "Take this time to grieve for your team, it's perfectly normal. Also, nobody gives a shit about you and I only scheduled ten minutes for this meeting so can we wrap this up?" She wants to hit something.

"Our metrics are outstanding," Kepler says calmly. "There's no tangible data to back up this decision."

"It's a test," Jacobi says, straightening up.

“Very good, Mr. Jacobi."

"Testing what?" Maxwell asks.

Kepler leans back against the counter. "It's a loyalty test. Now it's just a matter of deciding which way we should jump."

Maxwell rummages through his cupboards and starts to prepare coffee. "If we go along with it, we prove our loyalty to Goddard."

"Wrong," Jacobi says, immediately, getting up to start pulling down mugs. "If we go along with it we prove that we're capable of following orders. The Major's right, our stats are fantastic. If we wanted to do what's best for Goddard we wouldn't split up."

"Mr. Cutter is not Goddard Futuristics," Maxwell says, equations rearranging themselves in her head. She hates this, hates how even after almost eight months she's still coming up against missing data points.

"An important distinction," Kepler agrees. "So the question becomes, where does it benefit us the most to offer our loyalty?"

"If we go with Cutter we're less dangerous," Maxwell says, counting the drops of coffee as they fall into the glass pot. "And we maybe move further into his confidences."

"There is one person who is in Marcus Cutter's confidence and it will never be any of us," Kepler says, sharply.

"If we go with Goddard we're making a statement," Maxwell continues.

"So is it better to be seen as trustworthy or as competent?" Kepler says. "I know what my answer is."

"Do our answers matter?" Jacobi asks, sniffing the milk he's just pulled out of the fridge and frowning like Kepler's betrayed him as he turns to pour it down the sink.

"Not at all," Kepler says. "But it's nice to talk it out."

"Ok," says Maxwell. "So we proceed as normal?"

"Unless I tell you otherwise," Kepler agrees. He crosses the kitchen to put away the whisky bottle, stretching up past Maxwell to reach the cupboard in a way that has him pressed up along part of her back, pinning her loosely against the counter. She's still counting the drops of coffee. It takes a lot of focus not to stiffen up at his proximity, but it gets easier every time. It's not actually that bad-- he smells slightly of coffee and of shoe polish, and he'd telegraphed his intentions from all the way across the room.

When he steps back, he drops a hand to the back of her neck, reaching over to place his other hand on Jacobi's nape, casual and entitled. To an outsider, it would probably look incredibly weird and a bit awkward, but Maxwell is surprised to find herself relaxing without having to make any sort of conscious effort.

"Mexico City tomorrow. The briefing is in your emails. Wheels up at 06:00, whether we're approved for the operation or not."

"Yes Sir," they say, in unison. It still comes out a little bitter on her tongue, her respect for authority a tattered and dusty thing she is having to drag inch by inch from the bottom of her closet.

The next morning, Kepler is on the plane at 05:59, with a box of doughnuts and a sprained wrist and a shiny new rank. Neither of them comment.

***

She'd found a book once, shoved in the back of Jacobi’s closet, on the top shelf with the mismatched gloves and broken umbrellas-- new, shiny, probably a gift from a time when he was the sort of person who received gifts. She had opened it out of curiosity, out of boredom, which are the reasons she does most things and-- _You're in a car with a beautiful boy._

'Well,' she thinks. 'You're in a car, at least, and shouldn't that be enough?'

She spent the first seventeen years of her life memorizing the mathematics of gratitude for scraps, for scrapes and bruises and a hundred Hail Marys every Sunday. So she's in the car, and who she's with shouldn't matter; the way she's close enough to see the too-white teeth tear blood from a yielding pair of lips-- it sounds ridiculous even in her own head. She's in the car, in the backseat, and there's a sniper rifle lying across her lap and a slow trickle of blood creeping down her forehead and twelve inches away from her Warren Kepler is kissing Daniel Jacobi like he'd rather be breaking skin with the back of his hand.

She should get out of the car. She could walk home from here. There is blood crusting in her eyelashes. Kepler pulls back, one hand still wrapped around the back of Jacobi's neck. He looks at her and the little flash cards in the back of her head tell her he's going to ask her to leave, going to apologize, maybe, in that way that means it's really her fault and he's being very kind for pretending otherwise.

"Dr. Maxwell," he says, and reaches out with his free hand, rubs his thumb over the pool of blood that's coagulating in the tiny dip below her temple. His hands are always warm. The only one of them with good circulation. "You did well today."

She killed six people today. Headshots. Clean. There was a time, not too long ago, that she would have been bothered—though never enough, never as much as everybody says she should be. Another time, more recent still, that she would have been proud. Now she's just tired and a little hungry and she wants to see how far Jacobi will let Kepler go. Or maybe it's the other way around.

Kepler brings his hand back to cradle Jacobi's jaw and she watches the spot where Kepler's smeared her blood over Jacobi's bottom lip. It's hardly sanitary, but Jacobi licks it away like it's nothing.

She gets out of the car and she doesn't walk home. She runs.

*

Kepler killed his father, which she knows because he tells her so while he stiches up a bullet wound in her thigh with hands shaking from amphetamines and anger. Tells her how he stood in front of his mother and God and Mr. Cutter and everyone and talked about the tragedy of the loss, how he put the first shovel of dirt on the grave like victory.

"It was a good thing it was raining," he says, and grins at her like they're sharing an inside joke. She's never cried at the right times, either, but she's never shot her father in the head with his own gun. Maybe she should try it. Maybe she'd learn something.

Later, she swims up to consciousness through a fog of painkillers and she can hear Jacobi breathing next to her. It takes a few seconds to understand why.

"Good morning," Kepler says, and does something with his hips that leaves Jacobi making soft, desperate little noises on each inhale. It's still dark outside, moonlight striping across the hardwood of Kepler's bedroom. She didn't mean to fall asleep here.

Jacobi throws an arm out and it lands across her stomach; she wraps a hand around his wrist-- cool metal and gears working under the false skin. He twists his hand until he's linked their fingers together.

Kepler hovers over Jacobi like every nightmare she had as a child of the Devil creeping up over the flowered bedspread and sliding clawed hands into her chest while she slept, making a home their, making himself comfortable in the hollow space nature left there for him. In the darkness his shape is indistinct, and she wants to ask Jacobi how it feels to be in love with a concept. Inaccurate on all counts, of course. Kepler is as flesh and blood as either of them and whatever Jacobi feels for him it cannot be called love.

She feels the way Jacobi moves beside her, like the ocean, like Kepler is the water and Jacobi is the sand, soft and shifting and go too far into either and you'll eventually drown. She’d read the metaphor in a book when she was very young and she likes the way it sounds in her head, still.

She turns her head on the pillow so she can watch Jacobi's face. They are very close together. His breath smells like toothpaste and when she touches his cheek it's soft, freshly shaved. Jacobi presses their foreheads together and she matches her breathing to his. His eyelashes brush her cheeks every time he blinks. The pain in her thigh is a low background hum in her bones, getting louder and louder the longer she's awake.

Kepler says, "Look at me."

Jacobi comes clutching her hand so hard she can feel her bones grinding together. She watches the shifting darkness that is Kepler, sees the flash of his teeth, stark white, hears his single, sharp exhale. Kepler climbs over her legs to get off the bed. He's careful not to jostle her injury.

"God," she says, as soon as he's disappeared into the bathroom, quick slice of harsh light highlighting the rainbow of bruising across his ribs and the amused little curl to his lips, "is it always so performative?"

"What's the point, otherwise?" Jacobi says, flopping over so his face is smushed into her collarbone.

"You seemed to enjoy yourself."

"I enjoy the performance of it, like you said. My body gets pleasure feedback because he's good at literally everything."

"Except emotions," she says. "And being a real person. You're the best at that."

"Then we're absolutely fucked," he says, immediately. "But I mean, it's a trust thing. And a power thing. Sex is an easy way to express all that, and he didn't exactly look like he was up for anything complicated. What the fuck happened to you two?"

"Resistance fighters," she says. "The next time R and D says they're kidnapping you tell them they're not allowed. Also, all I'm hearing is that you're easy."

"Your face is easy," he says. "Go back to sleep."

She drifts. Wakes up briefly when Kepler sits on the edge of the bed and presses more pills between her lips, then again when the first morning sunlight starts burning her eyes. There's a radio playing in the kitchen but she can't make out any of the words. She didn't mean to fall asleep here.

*

"I knew they shouldn't have given you your own office," Jacobi says. It's the first day of December. She has been staring at the same piece of code for the past two hours. She drank three energy drinks in a row because they were free and she wanted to see what would happen. She's only been under the desk for half an hour, Jacobi can shut the fuck up.

"I miss snow," she says, instead.

"It's always too hot," he says immediately. "Yeah."

"Is Kepler speaking to you yet?"

"Christ, Alana."

Kepler has been angry for days; has only spoken to her to remind her what a spectacular waste of space and resources her existence is, and has been ignoring Jacobi's existence entirely. Just because he isn't subtle about using their childhoods against them doesn't mean he's not also successful. It's insulting on a variety of levels, and she is fully goddamn aware that the real punishment is that she's still affected by it in the first place.

Carefully, she slides herself over so there's room for him to join her under the desk. Everything feels very precarious, like her body is drunk and has forgotten to inform her brain. Her heart is beating very hard and her head may be at risk of floating away. Jacobi sits down beside her, giving her a vaguely judgmental look as he does. He has to hunch forward uncomfortably to avoid hitting his head.

He smells like smoke and gun powder and somebody else's cologne and she leans into his side automatically as soon as he's settled. This freedom of safe physicality between them will never stop striking her as miraculous. That she can invade his space whenever and however she wants and he doesn't feel threatened. That he can do the same. After a lifetime of doctors and distant relatives and their own families using their bodies to control and hurt them, to take away their bodily autonomy, they take every opportunity to touch each other, to revel in the simplicity of a safe touch.

Jacobi's eyes are sunken and his hair is unwashed. He looks hungover as fuck.

"You look hungover as fuck," she says.

"Fuck you. You look like you're about to die."

"I mean, it's... a possibility?" She remembers reading something about the dangers of energy drinks but it was years ago and she'd deleted the information as irrelevant. "You can't let him get to you like this, it's exactly what he wants."

"I am very fucking aware, thank you. I didn't know you had a doctorate in psychology, too."

"At least I finished my PHD," she snipes, and then "I'm sorry, I don't know why I said that."

"Goddard would have paid for it if I wanted to," he says, shrugging. "I didn't see the point when I was only one year in and already self-medicating depression with alcohol."

"Also you wanted Kepler to take you on missions."

"Also that, yes. It worked out pretty well for me."

She doesn't comment. Unlike Jacobi, she still likes to comfort herself with the fiction that, had Kepler not recruited her, she would have wound up somewhere other than prison. Instead she changes the subject.

"Are we allowed to go to the holiday party this year?"

Jacobi snorts. "Rachel Young is organizing it. What do you think?"

"That's... horrifying. I'm almost sad to miss it."

"You know she's been telling everyone with security clearance lower than 5 that we're Kepler's annoying white fluffy dogs?"

Maxwell blinks rapidly. "I didn't know people under 5 were allowed to know Kepler exists."

He shrugs, and she lets her own body be moved along with it. Everything feels far too real, too bright even though the lights are dimmed to their lowest setting.

"Hey, isn't that the same code you were working on yesterday?" He pokes at her screen with a finger stained black with ash. She bats his hand away.

"No, I've only been working on this for a couple... hours..." She frowns at the time on her computer screen. “That's not right."

"Uh huh," he says, flatly. "Come on, time to go home. Not like Kepler will care if I clock out early."

She elbows him. "Negative attention is not good attention."

"Eh," he waves her words off. "At this point I'll take what I can get. At some point this goes from an attack on my deep-seeded past traumas and turns into Jr. High bullshit, and we are fast approaching that point."

She drums her fingers on the edge of her laptop. "You're angry," she says, a revelation. "I didn't notice. Does this mean you're done tragically moping around?"

"I wasn't moping."

"You absolutely were, but this is going to be far more interesting." She should have realized he was angry when he took the dig at her qualifications, but her mind keeps wanting to go back to her coding and her body is doing she doesn't even fucking know what. Jacobi's hungover and probably barely sleeping, he's not about to expend energy on externalizing his emotions if he doesn't have to.

"Come on," he says. "I want sushi." She doesn't want to move. Here under a desk with her best friend feels like a secret, like the parts of her childhood that were denied to her. She feels, however erroneously, that no one can find them here. It's a very safe feeling.

Jacobi pushes to his feet and she looks up at him, at the way his shoulders loosen as he straightens, the way his eyes scan the office and, finding nothing, he lets out a soft breath. She glances down, ashamed. She hadn't been the only one feeling like a child.

*

Kepler says, "Would you die for me?", and she thinks

'We're in fucking Walmart,' but she says "Yes" before she can think better of it.

He's sighs a little like he's disappointed and drops a sleeping bag into the cart. "I wouldn't even bother asking Jacobi, but I expected better from you, Alana."

She says, "I would also kill you, if that helps," and "We need another backpack if you were serious about ditching the car," and neither of them acknowledge the fact that half a mile away Jacobi is torturing a Kindergarten teacher for information.

"I already knew that," Kepler says, laughing a little. "It's one of the reasons I like you."

"High praise," she says dryly. She doesn't say 'you only like me because I remind you of yourself and your ego is the size of a small country', but she really wants to.

"Yes. I like very few people."

"Mr. Cutter isn't one of them," she says. Her heart is suddenly beating very hard in her chest but if he's determined to have inappropriately personal conversations in the Walmart then she's going to bring her A game.

Kepler steps behind her to grab a tarp, but once it's in the cart he stays behind her, puts a hand on her shoulder. She leans into the pressure.

"Oh but Alana," he says, and he's laughing at her, she can tell. "I'd die for him."

"False," she says, almost before he's finished speaking. "I meant it. This is your fault, you don't have to throw it in my face."

"And I already said I expected better of you. Stop fishing for approval you don't deserve."

"How long are you going to wait, Sir?"

"As long as it takes. I'm very patient."

"Also, Cutter is terrifying."

"Mr. Cutter is a monster, and he wants a world of monsters in his image. What do you think Young and I are?"

"We're all monsters, that's nothing new."

"No. We here at Goddard Futuristics are, as the name suggests, futurists. And if you are a monster, you don't go after another monster with your claws and your teeth. You make tools. Weapons. Instruments of the future. Innovate."

His hand on her shoulder is leaving bruises. She keeps her whole body relaxed, open. There are times to show her fear to this man and now is not one of them. Plus, if she's honest with herself, it's not really fear she's feeling. The tingles sparking down her spine, the breath quick in her lungs, none of that is because she is afraid. 

Everyone in her past who has tried to claim ownership over her body has been doing so in order to limit her, to hold her back, to press and twist her into a shape they liked. Kepler has been the tide wearing on their stone, a laser slicing away the slivers of extraneous data, a chisel carving out a place for his hand and his voice and his finger on the trigger. He is not a leash holding her back, he is a fire burning everything at her heels until pushing herself beyond her assumed limits becomes her new default. It's the same for Jacobi, though she thinks Kepler is sometimes kinder with him. More cautious around something he will never fully understand, no matter how much he plays at omniscience.

Later, when the three of them are pressed up together in a canvas tent while rain pelts down outside, she turns to watch Kepler where he's cleaning his handgun in the light of the flashlight app on his phone. At her back, warm in their zipped-together sleeping bags, Jacobi shifts and presses his forehead against her shoulder blades.

"You killed your father with his own weapon," she says. Kepler doesn't look up.

"My father killed himself. He liked to show off. All I did was put the bullet in the gun. He should have been more careful. Basic gun safety. Always know if your weapon is loaded and where it's pointing. I always do."

She remembers her blood on Jacobi's lip. "Do you," she says, flatly.

**Author's Note:**

> No I will never get sick of basically writing the same story over and over again thank you for asking.  
> The book mentioned is, of fucking course, Richard Siken's Crush, leave me alone I know.  
> Come yell with me on tumblr, I'm [Thought-42](http://thought-42.tumblr.com)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [radiant energy](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13208538) by [renardroi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/renardroi/pseuds/renardroi)




End file.
